hear how unreverendly that precious jewel,
the Word of God, is disputed, rimed, sung, and jangled in every alehouse
and tavern. This kind of man is depraved and that kind of man, this
ceremony and that ceremony." All this controversy might be done away by
simple charity. "Therefore be in charity one with another like brother
and brother. Have respect to the pleasing of God; and then I doubt not
that love I spoke of shall never be dissolved between us."

[Sidenote: The Religious Truce.]

There is something wonderful in the English coolness and narrowness, in
the speculative blindness and practical good sense which could look out
over such a world at such a moment, and could see nothing in it save a
quarrel of "opinions, and of names devised for the continuance of the
same." But Henry only expressed the general feeling of his people.
England indeed was being slowly leavened with a new spirit. The
humiliation of the clergy, the Lutheran tendencies of half the bishops,
the crash of the abbeys, the destruction of chauntries and mass-chapels,
a measure which told closely on the actual worship of the day, the new
articles of faith, the diffusion of Bibles, the "jangling" and
discussion which followed on every step in the king's course, were all
telling on the thoughts of men. But the temper of the nation as a whole
remained religiously conservative. It drifted rather to the moderate
reforms of the New Learning than to any radical reconstruction of the
Church. There was a general disinclination indeed to push matters to
either extreme, a general shrinking from the persecution which the
Catholic called for as from the destruction which the Protestant was
desiring. It was significant that a new heresy bill which passed through
the Lords in 1545 quietly disappeared when it reached the Commons. But
this shrinking rested rather on national than on theological grounds,
on a craving for national union which Henry expressed in his cry for
"brotherly love," and on an imperfect appreciation of the real nature or
consequence of the points at issue which made men shrink from burning
their neighbours for "opinions and names devised for the continuance of
the same." What Henry and what the bulk of Englishmen wanted was, not
indeed wholly to rest in what had been done, but to do little more save
the remedying of obvious abuses or the carrying on of obvious
improvements. One such improvement was the supplying men with the means
of private dev